1. Textbook Regimes: Overall Analysis
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TEXTBOOK REGIMES a feminist critique of nation and identity an overall analysis Research Team Dipta Bhog Disha Mullick Purwa Bharadwaj Jaya Sharma Project Coordinator Dipta Bhog CONTENTS Gender in Education: Opening up the Field 1 An Analysis of Language Textbooks 32 Prologue 33 Forging a Vocabulary for the Nation 39 The Tussle between Tradition and Modernity 75 Romantic Visions of Labour: Class and Gender in the Textbook 99 Textbook Patterns of Violence 111 Marking the Body 127 An Analysis of Social Science Textbooks 142 Interrogating Power in History 143 Locked Within Colonial and Development Paradigms: A Reading of Geography Textbooks 193 Creating the Male and Female Citizen: The Norm of Civics Textbooks 209 An Analysis of Moral Science, Physical and Adolescent Education Textbooks 220 References 265 Annexures 1. Parliamentary Debate on Hindi Textbooks 269 2. Press Statement on NACO Adolescence Education material 271 3. Tables for Analysis of Textbooks 274 4. Textbooks Analysed 283 5. Research Partners 290 An Overall Analysis 1 Gender in Education: Opening up the Field … I am your mother. Not only yours, but also the mother of your ancestors. I am Ganga. Ganga, meaning, I give speed to that which can move even a little. I have descended on this earth primarily to give speed, that is why I am named Ganga. I desire to serve others incessantly… I bear witness - to penance and meditation [sadhana], to the sacrifice of lives into the holy fire for the protection of the country, and to the service of those who are troubled and poor. On my banks, a great civilisation has grown because of these sacrificial ascetics, and I have seen myself as an intrinsic part of this civilisation. This country’s culture and I are not separate. Excerpted from ‘I am Ganga’, Samba Hindi Reader 8, pp 69-72 Despite considerable debate on the content of education in the last 20 to 30 years, and an increasing acknowledgement of the significance of gender in the domain of curricula and policy, gender remains an under- researched and little understood area in the field of school education in India. Over the last two decades, female literacy has emerged as a key indicator of national development, thereby marking it as an important concern for policy planners.1 Questions of access and retention in schools have therefore dominated the domain of gender and education in India for 1 The UNDP-sponsored Human Development Report, for instance, is based on indices that evaluate the development process principally along three vectors, namely, longevity, education and com- mand over resources. The logic of this kind of statistical measurement has spurred a ‘race’ among developing countries to try and ‘catch up’ with others by way of a demonstrable improvement in these indicators. The Indian State no longer shies away from recognising the exclusion of girls from school as a denial of their basic right to education. On the question of gender, the National Human Development Report (GOI 2002) identifies its goals as: Bringing down the gender gap by 50 per cent, generating demand for girls’ education and building women’s capacity to effectively partici- pate in village-level processes. This push is also evident in the formulation of the SSA programme. 2 Textbook Regimes over two decades, be it in State or civil society organisations (non- governmental organisations, educational institutions). For instance, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), the Government of India’s flagship programme, aims at getting nearly 59 million out-of-school children into school. Of this, nearly 35 million are girls. A major focus area of the programme is bridging the gender gap, which involves getting girls to school and ensuring retention - but the question of how quality and equity will be addressed is not clear. The implicit assumption in all this is that enabling girls to enrol in school and stay there will automatically empower them, expand their life options and give them greater control of their lives. However, it is by now widely recognised that while schooling in and of itself can create new possibilities, it does not necessarily empower new roles for its participants. Like other institutions, it is also a site where dominant socio-cultural values and norms are reproduced and reiterated, thus implicitly validating existing power relations.2 An outcome of this assumed equation between education and empowerment for girls has meant that research and reflection on gender and education has revolved around mapping data on male- female participation in schools, drop-out rates or in identifying factors that limit participation of girls in schooling. The very act of going to school is seen to help society achieve its transformative goals. What happens to girls after they have sought entry into the classrooms goes largely unquestioned. Studies that understand the nature of classroom transaction and its role in constructing masculine or feminine identities are rare if not altogether absent. We are still to unravel how classroom transactions bring together a teacher’s own attitudes and a child’s perceptions built on her world outside the classroom, to create so-called normal/acceptable gender identities. Another area that remains outside the domain of inquiry is how current policy debates contrast with earlier historical debates when educating girls and women was tied to challenging the social order or in a majority of instances conserving it. What should women and girls be taught? How could the curricula be imagined so as to create a particular type of Indian woman? (Bhog 2002) These were areas of concern and heated debate in the nineteenth century (Bhattacharya 2001; Minault 1998; Sarkar 2007; O’ Hanlon 2002, Ranade 1963).3 Women’s education then 2 In an unpublished study done by Nirantar on a six-month residential school, Mahila Shikshan Kendra, in Auraiya District of Uttar Pradesh (August 2002), it emerged that an important motivat- ing factor for poor Dalit families in sending their daughters to study was to improve their marriage prospects. Also see Patricia and Roger Jeffries (1994) article that questions the role of education in enabling women to make decisions on their own. 3 The fear of western education refashioning the native woman to her white, western counterpart resulted in an emphatic concern with defining the kind of education suitable for Indian women. Preparation for chaste wifehood, strengthening their ‘self-sacrificing’, religious nature, producing patriotic sons—these emerged as some of the intended outcomes of educating the Oriental woman. An Overall Analysis 3 was not so much an end, it was a means to an end — the betterment of the family and the nation. An entire range of social values and cultural norms were tied into this debate. Have these concerns become outdated or do we see continuities in the articulation of ideas of nationhood, family and community existing in curricula and content even today? Is the schooling of girls a means to new ways of being or a transformation of existing ideas of nationhood and family into new vocabularies? How are ideas of nation and family being fashioned now - for girls and also for boys? Formulating a Study on the Textbook This study is a step towards opening up the issue of gender in school education for scrutiny and debate. We chose the textbook as the site for our exploration for a number of reasons. One, it is the site where larger curricular goals and the desired outcomes of education are broken down into concrete bits of information, concepts, exercises, visuals, etc. Curricular aims inform the content of the textbook and in a vital sense mirror them. It is also worthwhile to bear in mind that for many children textbooks remain the only source of information and knowledge on a whole range of subjects. Textbooks, in our opinion, also provided the possibility of exploring how school and nation linked up to create the ideal citizen of a modern, yet ancient nation. Just like how, in the nineteenth century, the idea of the Indian nation and the creation of a particular past, culture and tradition was critical to how schooling was imagined and operationalised for both men and women, in a similar vein the creation of ‘official knowledge’ identified and put out for mass consumption and communication through the textbook was critical to unpack the nation today. This critical lens afforded the chance of pushing gender analysis beyond charges of a ‘bias’ or having an ‘ideological slant’ that has become classic to critiquing curricular policy changes, to bringing in structures of patriarchy and other socio-political and economic structures of domination that underpin the content of learning. The issue of gender bias in school textbooks had been dealt with in particular ways: the non-representation of women and girls in textbooks and the promotion of stereotypes were identified as the two main aspects of gender bias. The solutions to this were to quantitatively increase the number of times women and girls appeared both at the level of text and pictorial representation, and to promote new images. In some cases a role reversal strategy was adopted. Here women were shown to do what men did or were as great/heroic as them. Gender was tied to the domain 4 Textbook Regimes of the social, an aspect of attitudinal change and value generation amongst children. However, none of these efforts looked at how a particular subject or discipline was taught. Syllabi outlines remained the same, unlike in higher institutions of learning and research, where feminist scholarship in Social Sciences, Economics and languages brought in new concepts, challenged existing ideas and expanded the boundaries of knowledge within and across disciplines — in some instances leading to a substantial reformulation of syllabi and content.